Epithalamion

In this blog post I'm only going to share one poem. This poem is important to me. Poets sometimes get asked to write poems for specific occasions, or they get asked if they know any poems for specific occasions like funerals and weddings. And so often do poets get asked to write poems for weddings that that is actually a category of poem; it's got a name, it's epithalamion. I was asked last summer to write a poem for the occasion of some friends getting married, and I figured no one other than the people at this wedding would ever hear this poem. But then I looked at it again today and I thought, oh, you know what, I could pretend that we are at a wedding because a wedding is an occasion where we're celebrating something new and something beloved. And I was lucky enough to be with my brother this weekend and his beautiful, brilliant wife, and today they surprised me that they will be having their first child together. So you'll have to go with me on it.
This is an epithalamion.

Perhaps you have noticed the way someone yawning
blooms a yawn in your own mouth as though it were your idea
and not a hand-me-down, the way an ocean wave is not invented
out of nothing but arrives from somewhere else, shifted from one shoreline of the
lopsided planet to another, so that every ocean is the same ocean, no
matter what edge of it you are dipping your toes in. You can stand on a cliff and watch a
storm roll towards you, passed around the globe like wet gossip, one storm
begetting another, the way my middle school science teacher told me matter cannot be created or destroyed, just
shifted from one state to the next, which is comforting on days you miss the
dinosaurs or need to remember that many people had to fall in love with a face
at least a little bit like yours in order for yours to get here.
Maybe God had a good idea one time, and the rest has all been dominoes: a
thunderclap begets a hiccup, begets an undertow, begets your certainty that a
face was made for you to love it. But ask the coral reef who knows we are
not good ideas and definitely not new ones, more like
galactic putty smushed into human form, who spend so much of our brief time here
losing sight of the storms we came from, the weather that moves through us, that
we unleash on everyone else. And who can blame us? There is no shame
in forgetting that our atoms once held together some other jellyfish when her
cheek on your pillow makes your skin too electric to be called anything but new.
When my great grandmother was towards the end of her time in the body I knew her in,
she started to lose herself, memory first but language close behind.
She misused words, mixed up phrases, said things incorrectly.
When she met someone, instead of saying "It is a pleasure to meet you,"
she would say, "It is a pleasure to love you." She understood that what feels unknown
is an opportunity for remembering, in which case, in some future when two
red-shouldered hawks see each other for what they think is the first time, they
might suddenly recall that there was once a day when we traveled many miles,
some of us whole lifetimes, so that we could meet you here in love.
And what more evidence will they need? What more evidence do you need that it
is a sincere pleasure to love you again and again?